I deactivated my first account 8 years ago, but got back on to re-connect with my old pals and acquaintances from back in the day. For that reason, it was fantastic.
After another year, I realized that I can't actually say ANYTHING interesting on this platform without offending someone. There's a lot of variety in my crowd. I have the sense IRL to know that not everything is for everybody, but that doesn't matter much on Facebook unless you want to spend hours and hours hand-crafting subsets of your friends for different topics (I don't). And I have zero interest in posting selfies or status updates of what's going on in my life, so that made the platform exceedingly boring and a waste of time for me. It's a shame, because it does work really well for "connecting" with people (in the shallowest sense of the word).
The only thing worse than people who are offended by everything is having to be afraid of offending over-sensitive people.
There's a lot of variety in my crowd
Which is a good thing. It's how it always was. You surrounded yourself with lots of different people with varying opinions. It's how you learned things. It was called being an adult.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scolia were polar opposites on the issues. But they were also very good friends. Because they were adults. They weren't children who had to surround themselves with familiar things that reinforce their own views of the world.
I remember in college, we were encouraged to seek out differing opinions. I remember a guy who once chastised me for not seeking a broad enough range of opinions. He said, "What's wrong with you? Don't you want to be challenged?" My understanding is that sort of thing would never happen on a college campus today.
Be who you are. If people can't respect you for having a different opinion, they're not adults, and they're certainly not "friends," Facebook or otherwise.
The frustrating (and silly) thing is that this argument is used a lot to attack left-leaning folks who _do_ engage with many people whose experience and world view are very different from them... like people who are homeless, immigrants from other countries, people who are racially minoritized, people who are disabled.
For many people who don't experience those kinds of life experiences, building relationships with those folks can be really tough and bring into question a lot of the foundations of their world view.
The argument that left-leaning people won't engage with right-leaning people often feels like it's used as an excuse for right-leaning folks to use rhetoric and hold positions that routinely disenfranchise and threaten the safety of the kind of people that left-leaning people have worked to empathize with and build relationships without consequence. That the people who continue to have right-leaning views don't seem interested in putting in the same _effort_ to empathize and build relationships with people other than themselves is both hypocritical and not surprising to me.
Finally, engaging with "challenging" opinions is all well and good as a mental exercise, but building and maintaining a relationship with someone is a project that requires continuous work (even as just a friendship) and I think it's worthwhile to be selective in the people who you put in that kind of work for.
Disenfranchising issues (such as gay rights, police brutality, immigration, right to abortion, etc.) is not only theoretical to some people, but a real threat to their lives and well being. A person playing the devils advocate arguing for limits on immigration to an immigrant is not only annoying but actively threatening to an immigrant at risk of being deported.
A number of people have full rights to be insulted when points are raised on a number of subjects. In fact they also have the rights to react angrily if the subject is a direct threat to their lives and livelihood. People arguing things often don’t realize that there is a person on the other end of the debate, a person with feelings, like love and compassion, but also anger and disgust. If a subject threatens or belittles, them being insulted or angry is the natural response.
There is a limit at which this is true, but most discussion of these issues doesn’t encroach into that territory. As an immigrant from a Muslim country I don’t feel “threats to my safety” when Trump talks about Islamic fundamentalism or extra scrutiny over immigration from certain countries. (It would be pretty odd to declare those topics off-limits, seeing as how the Muslim country I’m from has taken aggressive measures to fight the same exact fundamentalist forces.) I might feel differently if we were talking about putting Muslims in internment camps. But nobody is doing that, even though the left is acting like they are.
Does the US have “too many immigrants?” Until 2007, a plurality of Hispanic Americans (many of whom are immigrants) said “yes.” https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/02/19/latinos-hav.... Even today, 1 in 4 do. Only 14% say we have “too few immigrants” (which is the view de facto embraced by our current policies, which will lead to increased numbers of immigrants.) Given those views, it’s bizarre to treat discussion of immigration issues as off-limits.
You see this on issue after issue: leftists declare huge swaths of issues as off limits for discussion even to the point of excluding discussion of positions held by large swaths of the groups at issue. For example, 37% of women want to restrict Roe further or overrule it completely, compared to 38% who want to loosen its restrictions either somewhat or significantly. Another 16% want to maintain the status quo. http://maristpoll.marist.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/NPR_.... Supermajorities of women, moreover, support measures like waiting periods.
Or, consider “police brutality.” An editor at the NYT was fired for running a op-ed by Tom Cotton advocating a law-and-order response to violence following the death of George Floyd. Recent polling shows that a majority of Hispanic people, who are disproportionately the target of aggressive policing, think “the breakdown of law and order” is a “bigger problem” than “systemic racism.” Large majorities of Black and Hispanic people want to either maintain existing levels of policing, or further increase them.
In practice, it’s your approach that’s “disenfranchising.” That rule makes the majority uncomfortable with expressing anything but the most left-leaning views with respect to a minority group. For example, Ilhan Omar and Linda Saraour say expectations of assimilation are “racist.” This is not even a mainstream opinion among American Muslims, who are one of the most assimilated groups in the country. (To the point that a majority voted for George W. Bush in 2000.) But a big fraction of well-meaning non-Muslims don’t want to be called racist. So they feel comfortable amplifying anti-assimilationist views, but not pro-assimilationist ones. Since non-Muslims are a huge majority of people, that dramatically distorts and biases the debate around Muslim assimilation in a manner that doesn’t reflect the views of Muslims themselves.
That phenomenon has had a real impact on the debate over abortion. A quarter of Democratic women want to further restrict Roe or overrule it. That viewpoint is completely unrepresented among Democratic men.
In this comment, you depict left-of-center resistance to these discussions as irrational. But of course, it's not at all irrational; in fact, it's probably vital.
There are also special considerations when you’re talking about issues that affect minorities, outside a political context. There, the approach of selectively amplifying extreme positions can overwhelm ideological diversity (or even majority views) within minority groups. The other day, my dad—a blue dog Democrat—expressed his frustration at how “the media has made Ilhan Omar the face of Muslims.” I’ve observed the palpable discomfort people in liberal circles have expressing views on immigration to the right of Omar. They feel like the way to be “allies”—and insulate themselves from being called racist—is to “amplify” views like her’s. But the net result of that is that debate around issues like assimilation—within the left—is totally dominated by these extreme views. And that seriously disenfranchises people. Especially in contexts, such as academic institutions and media, controlled by the left, where there is no need to deal with the potential opposite extreme positions on the right.
[Now I don’t know if this has ever happened (usually I don’t call people misogynists unless they talk about women as objects) but let’s go with this]
We can rephrase this as: Person A says pregnant people should be forced to undergo their pregnancy. Person B says this person in misinformed in an insulting manner.
What might have even happened in this discussion (we are just being theoretical here, right, so we can entertain, right? Or at least we don’t want this topic to be off limits right?) is the following: Person A actually said: “If it were up to women, humanity would be extinct in a generation. Women are evil, and we should not grant them any rights, particularly not the right to determine the birth of their children”. Person B responds: “I’m glad you’ve shown your bigoted misogynistic face. Now we all know what kind of a person you are, and whether we should keep listening to you. Do your self a favor and keep these opinions to your self unless you want to keep embarrassing your self”.
Who here is guilty of shutting down the debate? Who here decided that talking about abortion rights is “off topic”?
Now person B most certainly suggested that person A shouldn’t continue this debate. They also definitely insulted person A. But is anything here in their response surprising? Did they do anything wrong? How about we look at person A in this context? Do we want people like that expressing their opinion? Person B might have insulted person A, and hoped they would leave and never come back, but person A was insulting all women and calling for a whole group of people to have their decisions dictated by other people.
So why am I taking this example? It is obviously an exaggeration and not specifically what we are taking about here. But for all I know this is the kind of conduct that many people say us “lefties” are doing when we “mark a topic off limits”.
Ancestor’s point was this exactly, many people claim that us lefties want to shut down the topic because we get offended by everything. But do we? Are we maybe just behaving in a completely rational way, insulting back people that have insulted us? Asking people to stop that are threatening us, our friends, or people that we know exist?
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PS: Off course in your example there is another qualifier there: “using federal funds for abortion”. People might have many reason disagree with that including being for forced pregnancies. But now the goalpost has been moved a little hasn’t it? So I took the liberty of moving it in the other direction my self. You provided an example that has probably never happened in reality, so I provide a counter example that also probably never happened, sounds fair?
Apart from that, my hypothetical is one that happens all the time. Article after article denounces policies like waiting periods, which the majority of women support and which exist in other developed countries, as misogynistic: https://www.vice.com/en/article/qkg753/what-its-like-to-endu....
Stepping back, a problem with your examples is the individualistic framing. Abortion undoubtedly involves a woman’s bodily autonomy. But it also undoubtedly involves another living thing. (Regardless of what political rights you believe that thing should have, it’s alive as a scientific matter.) Even Roe recognizes that a societal interest in the unborn child kicks in during the second trimester. (Roe, by the way, is unusual even in developed countries. Where many countries have abortion by law, almost none guarantee it under their constitution. Around the same time as Roe, the Canadian Supreme Court declared abortion to be purely a legislative matter. And the German constitutional court declared allowing abortion to be an unconstitutional violation of a fetus’s right to life. That’s still the law in both countries.) It also involves society generally. The fact that the developed world spends tremendous amounts of aid money assisting developing countries to reduce their birth rates belies the idea that reproduction has purely individual effect. Framing it in purely individualistic terms makes it seem more like it shouldn’t be up for debate, but only because the framing cuts out all the interests actually involved. Likewise, a discussion about immigration isn’t just about the immigrant, but about the society that has to expend resources integrating and supporting the immigrant. When you reframe these issues in individualistic terms to exclude effects on other people, they seem more like things that shouldn’t be subject to debate. But that’s just a product of the artificial framing.